Written and directed by Maria Bissell
Starring Vanessa Marano, Leah Lewis, Chris Mulkey, Gabrielle Carteris and Abbie Cobb
Running time: 1 hour and 25 minutes

by Nikk Nelson

“It’s like Fargo meets Home Alone,” is how writer/director Maria Bissell described her feature debut in the chat preceding the screening of How to Deter a Robber (2020). I’m not sure who wrote up the synopsis for the festival, but they described the two main characters as ‘amateur detectives who investigate the wrong cabin’. They honestly must have mixed up another film’s synopsis because it wasn’t the story at all. The film follows Madison, played in a stellar, standout performance by Vanessa Marano, a young woman with lofty collegiate ambitions aimed at living a life as a successful writer. Her girl Friday is her boyfriend, Jimmy, a hapless but sweet clown that makes Madison laugh and takes her mind off her very tumultuous relationship with her mother. After one particularly disastrous Thanksgiving dinner, wherein Madison and her mother’s bickering cost the family the turkey, Madison and Jimmy sneak into the neighbor’s house for a quiet night of partying, away from the tension at home. When they awake the next morning, they find the house has been ransacked.

With Madison and Jimmy being the police’s prime suspects for the robbery, they are not allowed to leave the county, and are left in the care of Madison’s uncle Andy, played by that guy actor, Chris Mulkey, who attracted me to this film originally—he turns in a slightly curmudgeonly, but ultimately gentle and caring, performance that adeptly holds the emotional tone of the film together. They arrive at Uncle Andy’s house only to find that he too has been robbed. So they all return to the family home to wait, hoping, at least in Andy’s case, that the police will soon catch the burglars and everything will go back to normal. Madison and Jimmy take a more proactive approach and booby trap the house in case the robbers do come back to the neighborhood. And, of course, they do. What plays out through the rest of the film is mostly what you’d expect. The burglars tie them all up and they try to get away. The innocent sweetness of burglar Abbie played against the colder, more capably violent Sonny, unfortunately, doesn’t add enough originality to this well-trodden formula.

For long stretches of time, we sit, tied up in the living room as Abbie does her best to make all of the hostages comfortable while Sonny loots the house. There’s an almost insufferable sequence where Abbie, trying to get them all a drink of water, first brings them water, realizes they can’t drink it because they’re tied up, so she brings stools to set the water on, still not quite right, until she finds and brings them all straws. It feels like a solid five minutes spent getting the characters a drink of water. I understood it was meant to establish Abbie as a sympathetic character, perhaps implying she was unwillingly dragged into this criminal endeavor by her boyfriend, but she and Sonny are never developed enough as characters for this to meaningfully land. The booby traps and Jimmy shenanigans offer some very effective comic relief and there are a couple of genuinely surprising moments, the best of which, really serves Madison’s character. I found, at the core of this film, a similar message from Midsommar (2019) about understanding your worth and not staying in toxic relationships—although it doesn’t quite hit you over the head with it like that mallet the villagers use when you don’t quite die plummeting off of plummet-y rock. How to Deter a Robber is composed and shot wonderfully (Stephen Tringali) and as of its festival premier, was without a distributor. I have no doubt it will find one and I hope we can look forward to more great filmmaking in the future from Maria Bissell.

How to Deter a Robber played at the 2020 Fantastic Film Festival and will hopefully be available to watch soon.

*Hear Nikk Nelson on MJ’s podcast, I Saw it in a Movie - episode 024.*